External technology acquisition; Catching-up; Innovation performance; Chinese auto firms

Second, in a broader perspective, integrating different streams of technological knowledge is becoming crucial to innovation in an era of technology rapidly changing for a firm (even a large company). The need for increased differentiation in technology acquisition and its increased application integration make technology markets more important (Ahuja and Katila, 2001; Grant, 1996). GEELY’s practice demonstrates that choosing appropriate technology acquisition strategies at different development stages according to different international circumstances is also crucial for latecomer firms to catch up with leaders, such as utilizing cooperative R&D at the moment of improving production capability, starting M&A from small and medium companies to large corporations after possessing basic absorptive capacity of technology and experience of international management.

Moreover, in accordance with studies on technology acquisition and technological performance relationships, this research also proves that matching technologies acquired externally with internally developed capability improves technological performance of latecomer auto firms significantly. Instead of excluding its commitment on in-house R&D activities, GEELY sees external technology acquisition as a means of complementing and leveraging its development capability. Firms should not rely on external technology acquisition completely to substitute internal input accumulation over time. Otherwise, as latecomer firms, technological innovation will never be realized, as well as competitiveness on market.

With some enormous environmental changes from that of Korean and Japanese latecomer firms’ catching-up era, namely technology leaders’ growing reluctance technology transfer, emergence of various standardization, shortening of technology/product life cycles and phenomena of technology fusion, this paper seeks to provide useful insights and lessons to companies of other NIEs by illuminating how a Chinese auto firm is able to accumulate technological capability in a short time. Incidentally, the advantage of single case studies is to track development process to prove or build a theory. But there still exists generalizability limitations too, as the experiences in a single company may not fully cover those could have happened in other companies. Further empirical research is necessary to examine related findings in different industries and companies.

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